The Q&A (Question and Answer) part of the call is the part I most like to hear…and this time, the vast majority of questions were about the possible Prime increase.

Prime appears to make Amazon a lot of money (through increased sales and loyalty)…why would they risk changing it?

First, I think they are right if they think this won’t lose them a lot of Prime members. Make it $99 a year, and we’d certainly still do it. They could do that (as was suggested by a caller) by making it an installment plan (maybe $25 a quarter). They could also tier the services: allow you to buy the shipping, Prime Video, and KOLL (Kindle Owners’ Lending Library) separately.

Second, this could be a big chunk of change…and quickly, over the course of a year.

They reportedly have tens of millions of Prime customers. They may not all be full price members, but let’s just say there are ten million, to be very conservative.

Ten million people paying $20 more in a year is a $200 million difference…Amazon could do some very interesting things with an influx of cash like that, even if part of it offsets previous expenses for Amazon for Prime.

The day’s change for Amazon stock? Up 18.81, 4.9%…

Happy ending?

Well, you know Wall Street…at least, you may know it better than me. 😉

You see, although they did really well, they didn’t meet “expectations”. Is that Amazon’s fault…or the fault of the people whose expectations were too high? 😉

Again, interesting stuff…feel free to comment.

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

You know those science fiction stories where a robot or computer decides the best way to serve homo sapiens is to protect it from its biggest threat…itself?

Apparently, a “highly automated” system at Digimarc, working on behalf of HarperCollins, has asked Apple to remove from the iTunes store e-books listed there to which HarperCollins has the rights…and which HarperCollins itself put there!

In other words, what is most likely happening here is that the system is looking for the books online, but doesn’t know where they are supposed to be.

That is one way to stop piracy! If you could stop a book from being distributed by anybody at any time in any way, there would be no piracy…or legitimate sales, for that matter. 😉

Thanks to the reader for the heads-up! I think you intended that to be private: if not, let me know and I’ll credit you here.

Amazon expands into…

One of \S/uperman’s powers, according to the old opening was (besides bending steel, etc.) was that the Kryptonian could “…change the course of mighty rivers”.

The Amazon, of course, is one of the mightiest rivers…and its e-tailer namesake is constantly changing its course.

In fact, anybody can change the course of a river: drop a rock in right next to the bank, and the river will flow around it, carving out a new spot.

That’s the way Amazon is…oh, it’s very hard to change where it has already been going (you know, except for online auctions) 😉 , but it keeps going new places.

and while it isn’t super cheap (it’s around $50), it’s a lot less than $300.

My guess is that an Amazon set-top box would bring more than mirroring. It would likely bring a significantly interesting interface, with a lot of curation (suggesting things for you).

It would have to sync with Amazon, of course, and seamlessly with your Fire.

It could have Mayday on it! That could make it hugely attractive.

With the way Amazon has done things in the past, it’s possible that it would have some desired software ability that would be more exclusive to it originally. For example, I could see it being the way to manage your Collections in your Cloud initially. It could let you drag and drop books from one Collection to another, with the argument being that the big screen makes it more possible somehow.

Yes, some people who didn’t get that would be upset…but they likely wouldn’t lose sales because of it.

Interface would be an interesting question. Would it have gesture detection? Would they make hardware joysticks for it?

Would it do text-to-speech? You know, I haven’t tried that with my Push2TV! If that worked, I would definitely use it with the louder speakers while doing things in the house. I’ll let you know…

Pre-release update (yes, I checked this before I actually published the post): Eureka! I can use my Push2TV to display the text from my Kindle Fire HDX while my TV plays the text-to-speech! Putting the KFHDX into landscape mode makes the print quite large, but it means I can listen while doing things that take my eyes away from the screen. That may sound super-bookwormy to some of you, but I will definitely use this. It also won’t hurt to have some of the images in the books on the big screen…and mirroring allows that. You could pause on a map to take the time to examine it carefully, or a graph in a non-fiction book. Seeing some images more than life-size will also be entertaining. This is the sort of serendipitous find I make when writing these posts that really makes me smile. 🙂

Update: this also means that we can read our Kindle Fires hands-free with “autoturn”, something people have wanted for a long time, while, for example, exercising or knitting. We’ve been able to turn down the volume on Kindles with text-to-speech (which “turns the pages”) for some time, but because we have variable speed (which can get quite fast) on the KFHDX, it will work better. This means that I can exercise with my KFHDX mirrored through the TV, the sound turned off, the TTS speed cranked up, and read while I work out…a whole new world! 😉

Amazon is also possibly going to expand into point-of-sales processing, according to this

This could actually be a very big deal. It’s not just that it would compete with Square, that little gadget that you see stuck on a cellphone or tablet to process your credit card (although it would do that, too).

I could see this going a lot more than that.

Picture this scenario:

You are shopping in a brick-and-mortar hardware store. A knowledgeable employee has helped you pick the right set of blinds for your guest room. That employee checks you out on a Kindle Fire…right there in the aisle.

Further more, you need some hardware to mount the blinds, and the store is out of it (or just doesn’t carry it). The store orders it from Amazon for you, it will arrive in a day or two (or maybe the same day, in the future, via drone), and the store gets a commission…or Amazon knocks off part of the processing fee for the credit card (which can be significant).

That’s what Amazon could do that other credit card processors can’t: add access to additional products, so the store doesn’t have to have as deep a stock.

That, in turn, could enable Amazon to charge lower processing fees.

Oh, and what if you could choose to pay in the storewith your Amazon account? Even if the store doesn’t go through Amazon to fulfill your order, Amazon getting the information about what you are buying (and where) could be a big plus for it…and again, could lower processing fees.

We can already pay with our Amazon accounts at many websites…why not in brick-and-mortars?

There are a lot of interesting possibilities here…

One more potential expansion, which could be really disruptive for a major competitor (at least in one part of Amazon’s many businesses).

the university has entered into a pilot program for students to buy things through Amazon.

University/College sales have been one of the relatively bright areas for Barnes & Noble. If that Amazon river gets diverted into college sales, it could result in a Carthaginian peace for Barnes & Noble and Amazon. 😉 A “Carthaginian peace” (at least in the idiom) is basically when you make peace with your enemy…by destroying them. I actually thought the story had gone that a river was diverted to wipe out what was left of Carthage after the war, but I must be conflating mythologies.

At any rate, free delivery with the Amazon Student Prime program could mean that you don’t have to pay $10 for a Post-Its pad while you are in college any more.

This is just a pilot program, but if it works well…it could knock the last sturdy leg out from under Barnes & Noble’s three-legged (retail, digital, college) stool.

Marcus Books fundraiser this Saturday

I’ve written before about attempts to save Marcus Books in San Francisco from closing. It’s an historic bookstore…and there was an effort to get it officially designated as such.

What do you think? Would you buy a set-top box from Amazon, or are you about gadget-ed out? What would it have to have? Are traditional publishers too concerned about piracy? Are bookstores any more entitled to efforts to save them than any other kind of store? Feel free to tell me and my readers what you think by commenting on this post.

* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

However, you can’t just buy e-books from those other sites if you want to do that.

A lot of people complain about that in the Amazon Kindle forums, but there is a good reason behind it (at least, with laws set up the way they are now).

Authors traditionally license the rights to sell their books to publishers. They normally license them by format (someone who licenses the rights for the hardback doesn’t automatically get the e-book rights or the audiobook rights) and by territory. The latter might be an individual country, but it could be a lot more than that (all of Africa, perhaps)…just depends on what is worked out.

If the publisher who licensed the right to sell a book in France sells it to somebody in the USA, they could be in serious trouble. That’s particularly true if a different publisher licensed the USA.

A lot of people counter that with the ability to buy paperbooks from other Amazon sites, but that’s quite different. With a paperbook, the store buys it from the publisher first, then sells it to the customer. If the store is able to export it, that’s fine…that’s not where the publisher sold it.

With an e-book, the sale doesn’t happen until the customer buys it…the store didn’t buy it first. The sale is basically considered to have taken place where the customer is (although it’s a tad trickier than that).

So, while the German site has over two and a half million books (many of which, I am guessing, are in German), that doesn’t mean all those same books are available to customers using Amazon.com.

I checked the state of foreign language books at Amazon.com back in November of 2009.

I got those results by searching for the language followed by the word “Edition”. For example, I would have searched for “French Edition”.

Amazon has since expanded the way it lists foreign language books. This is what it says now:

Spanish (80,230)

German (142,958)

French (40,986)

Italian (31,324)

Japanese (17,538)

Portuguese (19,382)

Chinese (2,895)

Afrikaans (1,716)

Russian (260)

Other Languages (5,722)

Now, just to give a more consistent comparison, I’ll search for “German Edition”. Doing it that way, I got 143,043…not that far off, and it might have some false positives.

So, honestly, we can say that the numbers have exploded! There are about seventy-five times as many German books, just to stick with one language!

If we compare that to the overall growth rate of the USA Kindle store, this is much, much higher. I recorded the titles in store count on December 1, 2009 as 385,484. On January 1 of 2014, I recorded 2,351,290. While that is a lot of growth (there are about six times as many books…more than doubling every year), it’s not even a tenth the rate of German book growth.

I think that the number of books where companies get global licenses has also greatly increased, and that may have something to do with it. It costs the company more initially, or at least I would assume that’s the case, but can certainly be worth it.

* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

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Tumblr is a “microblogging” site. Many of them post pictures, sometimes with captions, although you can actually post text.

I thought I’d just take a look for Tumbrs by searching for “Books Tumblr” on Google.

I have to warn you that Tumblr is also famous for having NSFW (Not Safe For Work) material, and it’s possible that will show up in this list. I will have looked a bit at the Tumblrs I list (in order to pick ten that I think are interesting), but they don’t all post those sorts of things every day. 🙂

This is an official Tumblr blog. It’s pretty much what you would imagine, with a modern social media twist. They pick a book for people to read, and then they discuss it…but there could be hashtags involved. 🙂

Mostly pictures of cats with books (and at least one cat with a Kindle).

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

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You know, you’re doing something, like stirring the oatmeal, and you think to yourself, “Why aren’t you reading?”

That exact experience happened to me today: I was stirring a pot of oatmeal, reading the news crawl on the TV with the sound off (my Significant Other wasn’t out yet), and feeling like it would have been better if I’d set my Kindle up nearby so I could read a book at the same time.

That, despite the fact that I have to keep my eye on the oatmeal at that stage: I’d certainly be flicking my eyes back and forth, and not getting a lot of reading done.

Still, I thought, it would have been better than nothing.

But is “not reading” the same as “nothing”?

Clearly not. There are a lot of valuable things in my life besides reading. 😉

However…

I have to say, I never feel guilty about having been reading. I also watch videos (TV, movie), although I’m often reading at the same time. I feel like I would have to justify having watched ten episodes of a mediocre TV show in a day…I don’t feel like one has to justify “binge reading” in the same way one does “binge watching”.

We have a new dog (we’ve had Elf* for a couple of months), and the three of us were walking up to the dog park (about a mile away). I didn’t read on the way up, which I would have done years ago if it was just me walking a dog.

Part of that is because I use a cane when I walk, now, and I have to keep looking where I put it: it w0uld not be a good thing to have that cane not provide solid support. That means that, even if I had my Kindle in my other hand, I wouldn’t have “eyes free” to see it. I could listen to text-to-speech, but that would take a major social element away from the walk.

Text-to-speech, though, has been a wonderful thing in the car! I like to say that I now feel like driving isn’t “wasted non-reading time”. 😉

It’s fascinating to me that so many people put reading on such an exalted plane: what can you do that is better for yourself and for the world than read?

However, it’s also clear that many people (perhaps more), don’t feel that way. “You shouldn’t read at the table.” “You should go outside and play”. “You should put down that book and meet people.” “You shouldn’t read while you are riding your bike”…well, that last one might have an argument. 😉 I knew somebody who smacked into the back of a parked truck, because they were riding a bike and reading at the same time.

Why do we feel like this?

Reading is the purest interaction we can have with another person’s mind…unencumbered by our perceptions of their physicality.

I’m sure that it’s true that people who read widely are more tolerant of others.

That doesn’t mean that reading is all you should do, of course…there are a lot of wonderful things to be done.

This is a great selection! There are 75 books from HarperCollins (I think they are all from HC), which is one of the five largest trade publishers in the USA…and they appear to each be $1.99!

Looking over the list, I’m struck by the amount of interesting non-fiction.

Remember that you can buy a book as a gift, and delay delivery until the appropriate occasion…this might be a good chance to get some small gifts for later.

Always check the price before you click that Buy button: books can move in and out of a deal, and this deal may not apply in your country.

Enjoy!

Update: by request from one of my regular readers, Harold Delk, here is a picture of Elf:

Elf weighs about 12 pounds, and is quite long. The vet said that Elf looks like a Dandie Dinmont terrier (mix), and while that would be a bit odd circumstantially, much of it does match (except without the usual fur). My Significant Other has decided that Elf is a mix between a terrier and a Slinky Dog…a “Slinkier”. 😉

—

What do you think? Do you have a good example of when you suddenly thought to yourself that “…this would be better if I was reading?” Where is the weirdest place where you’ve been reading a book, the one that would most shock non-readers? Have you ever read a book on a roller coaster? Does your hand feel empty without a book in it? If you were a reader growing up, how did that affect other people’s perception of you? Feel free to tell me and my readers what you think by commenting on this post.

* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

woot! deals tend to sell-out (I was a little surprised this one hadn’t yet), so I wouldn’t wait if you want one (or more…you can get up to 3).

This is the forerunner of the Kindle Paperwhite. It doesn’t have a built-in light…but it does have sound (which includes text-to-speech).

That makes this model particularly attractive to some people…I typically listen to TTS for hours a week in the car.

It has a four out of five star average on Amazon, with 8,358 reviews at time of writing. The Paperwhite does have a higher average: 4.4 stars.

If you were to buy a refurb on Amazon right now, it’s $79, so this is about a $25 savings.

Thanks for the heads-up!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

in my The Measured Circle blog, there are also books that should bring back fond memories.

Oh, and in case you are curious, under current copyright laws, books first published in the USA in 1964, which followed all the rules (proper copyright notice, renewals when possible), will fall into the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2060…so in 46 years, you should be able to read them for free. 😉

While Ian Fleming was still writing about James Bond (You Only Live Twice was also published this year), this kids’ book about a flying car was a hit…and would have been, even without the big screen adaptation.

Oh, yes, this had a big impact when it was released! It’s pop psychology.

The Giving Tree (at AmazonSmile)
by Shel Silverstein
4.3 stars, 1,100 reviews
$10.67 at time of writing (note: this is a pre-order, with the Kindle version to be published February 18)

I still think of Shel Silverstein first as a sort of counter culture musician, but people have loved this book for five decades. Note: this is one of the cases where I believe to text-to-speech access wasn’t blocked, but is unavailable because the text is part of the images.

* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

I’m going to look for more ways to do outreach on it. I think if you checked with your child’s teacher or the local librarian, they might know someone.

Update: we now have our first nominee! I will post nominating comments through January and February and March, and you can support nominees (multiple, if you like) by “recommending” them to get a Kindle using the polls which will appear in March.

A different demographic

I was quite pleased to see a picture on the Mindle (that’s what I call the least expensive Kindle) product page of someone who wasn’t in the New Millennial generation using a Kindle! Even more interestingly, that person wasn’t show interacting with a child or someone in a different age group.

Early on, informal surveys were showing that the majority of adopters of the Kindle were in the “Baby Boomer” and “Greatest Generation” age groups. It makes sense: a non-Fire is more of a book reader than a tech gadget, and older folks may benefit more from things like increasable text sizes and light weight.

So, while I don’t typically call attention to inherent characteristics (like age and gender), I do think this is a good thing. 🙂

Hm…the fact that I mentioned that it isn’t an older person interacting with, say, a grandchild reminds me of the Bechdel test. That’s an interesting (and sometimes controversial) test of works of fiction. It’s usually stated something like this:

“Does the work have two named female characters who have a meaningful conversation with each other about something other than a man?”

“The first thing I can remember buying for myself, aside from candy, of course, was not a toy. It was a book.”

I think many of us understand that. The piece goes on to talk about the state of reading today, and what a big difference it can make for people. I highly recommend it, not just for the memoir quality of it, but for the stats included about what groups are reading. It quotes another article that indicates that the number (perhaps the percentage?) of non-book readers in the USA has tripled since 1978. I’ll have to look at that story…if it’s the raw number, the population has gone up a great deal, which could help explain it.

This difference that reading can make to a child is the biggest reason I want to give away a Kindle. Once a child had one, they would have access to many classic books…for free.

It used to be pretty easy to determine if someone was an “author” or not. If they’d had a book traditionally published, they were considered authors by most people.

When that was really the only way to reach a wide audience, the fact that it had gone through that curation (as arbitrary or unjustified as some of it might seem to people) was an understandable standard.

Now, anybody can publish a book themselves, without too much difficulty.

Are you an author when you’ve done that?

Are you an author if you do that and no one buys it?

Are you an author if your write a book, and give away the e-book for free yourself through your website?

I suppose the important distinction here is between being an author, and being a professional author.

If you make a living just on your writing (I don’t), you’d be a professional author.

I certainly felt like it was something different the first time someone paid me to write something.

However…what if somebody has had New York Times bestsellers, but also has another job…even another job that makes them more money?

What is somebody just hasn’t sold a book…yet?

I’m not sure on this one. My instinct is to say that anybody who writes is an author, but that then becomes a decreasingly valuable label.

Amazon launches a Christian tradpub imprint

Amazon continues its march into traditional publishing territories with this

I think that some of the other Christian publishers are going to have to have meetings about this…

What do you think? When do you call someone an author…what are the criteria? Do the inherent characteristics of people in Amazon’s marketing materials matter? Does the Bechdel test matter to you? Do you think e-books will make more people into readers…or fewer? What was the earliest book you remember buying for yourself? Feel free to tell me and my readers what you think by commenting on this post.

* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

* I am linking to the same thing at the regular Amazon site, and at AmazonSmile. When you shop at AmazonSmile, half a percent of your purchase price on eligible items goes to a non-profit you choose. It will feel just like shopping at Amazon: you’ll be using your same account. The one thing for you that is different is that you pick a non-profit the first time you go (which you can change whenever you want)…and the good feeling you’ll get. Shop ’til you help!

** Although you’ll see this one marked as text-to-speech not being enabled, this is one of those cases where the text appears as part of the image: access has not been blocked by the publisher, to my knowledge. These are the original Batman comic books, from what I see

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

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This might be something which is in beta…which means that I might see and you might not. It can even mean that I see it on one computer and not on another, even using the same browser. That’s similar to the new Manage Your Kindle page (Major changes to MYK: bulk actions)…so far, I’ve only seen it in Silk on my Kindle Fire HDX, despite checking other devices and browsers.

page, you could use the Settings to reset it so it pointed to another Amazon site…although they don’t specifically mention Amazon.com.

My guess?

They are sort of beta-testing it with the UK, and that we’ll get it in the USA before too long.

If you test it now, though, and are able to set it to Amazon.com, I’d appreciate you letting me know. 🙂 I’m not using a compatible browser right now, or I’d test it myself.

I think this could be a big hit! There are so many times I go to Amazon to check something, and this might make it a lot easier. That, in turn, may help Amazon make even more sales. 😉

This post by Bufo Calvin originally appeared in the I Love My Kindle blog. To support this or other blogs/organizations, buy Amazon Gift Cards from a link on the site, then use those to buy your items. There will be no cost to you, and a benefit to them.

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